Sams Teach Yourself Linux in 24 Hours is a tutorial aimed at making the Linux beginner more effective and productive users of the operating system. Most books in this category are more of a general reference in nature and are designed to cover Linux in general. Well, every Linux distribution is different - file locations can change, commands can be a little different, etc. This means the readers of those books may not find answers specific to their installation. This book will use the effective Sams Teach Yourself format to instruct the reader how to: install the operating system, configure their hardware, and effectively use the tools that come with the Red Hat distribution included on the CD-ROM.

• Learn how to install Red Hat Linux by walking through an easy to follow hardware configuration
• Understand how to use Linux commands, configure your network and servers and manage users of your system
• Discover the power of X(TM) Windows
• The CD-ROM delivers Red Hat Linux V5.0--a $49.95 value-- complete with source code

Introduction

Welcome to Ubuntu Unleashed, 2008 Edition! This book covers the free Linux distribution named Ubuntu and includes a fully functional and complete operating system produced by the Ubuntu Community, sponsored by Canonical Software. This book covers Ubuntu version 8.04 LTS, commonly known as the Hardy Heron.

Ubuntu directly descends from one of the oldest and most revered Linux distributions ever: Debian. Those of you who know nothing about Linux will likely not have heard of Debian; it is enough to know that it is considered to be one of the most stable and secure Linux distributions currently available. Ubuntu benefits directly from many contributions from free software developers across the world.

If you are new to Linux, you have made a great decision by choosing this book. Sams Publishing’s Unleashed books offer an in-depth look at their subject, taking in both beginner and advanced users and moving them to a new level of knowledge and expertise. Ubuntu is a fast-changing distribution that can be updated at least twice a year. We have tracked the development of Ubuntu from early on to make sure that the information in this book mirrors closely the development of the distribution. A full copy of Ubuntu is included on the enclosed disc, making it possible for you to install Linux in less than an hour! No longer an upstart, Linux now has an enviable position in today’s modern computing world. It can be found on machines as diverse as mobile phones and wristwatches, all the way up to supercomputers— in fact, Linux currently runs on more than half of the world’s top 500 supercomputers.

Introduction to Expression Blend

Taking aside the technical aspects of learning how to use Microsoft Expression Blend, there are many areas that are often disregarded within discussions about how Blend is— and should be—used in a real-world project sense. You may be a single person business or employee that needs to fill all the roles that Blend is best used for; or, you may be part of an enterprise size team.

Knowing, why a tool should be used in a certain way sometimes makes it easier to apply the options provided. This chapter talks about areas within project teams, their roles, and their perspective.

The Next Generation User Experience

One of my favorite pastimes is watching movies. I don’t care how old they are or if I have already watched them 10 times. I find that watching movies relaxes me; it allows me to escape my own thoughts for an hour or two, and most of the time they inspire and motivate me in some way.

I especially enjoy watching movies in which computers are used in the plot in some way. I guess that is the geek coming out in me, but there is something special about the user interfaces, and in some spectacular cases the visual and interactive design, that are also explored in such movies. Minority Report, with Tom Cruise, is a great example of what we want to be moving toward in providing an outstanding user experience and interface. That interface (and indeed the entire process that encompasses Tom’s user experience)

Introduction

By the time you are holding this book in your hands, I will have 30 years in since the first time I wrote some code. That code was ROM-BASIC on a TRS-80 in Washington grammar school in Owosso, Michigan, and I was in the fifth grade. Making the “tank” slide back and forth shooting blips across the screen was neat. Changing the code to change blip speeds and numbers of targets was exhilarating. Three decades later and I get more excited each passing year. There are great technologies on the horizon like Microsoft Surface, Popfly, and LINQ. This book is about LINQ, or Language INtegrated Query.

LINQ is a SQL-like language for C#. When I first saw it, I didn’t like it. My first impression was that someone had glommed on a bastardization of C# and it was ugly like SQL can get. I didn’t like it because I didn’t understand it. However, I gave LINQ a second chance (as I want you to do) and discovered that LINQ is thoroughly integrated, tremendously powerful, and almost as much fun as a Tesla Roadster or doing hammerheads in an Extra 300L.

The query capabilities of LINQ are extended to objects, SQL, DataSets, XML, XSD, entities, and can be extended to other providers like Active Directory or SharePoint. This means that you can write queries—that are similar in syntax— against objects, data, XML, XSD, entities, or Active Directory (with a little work) much like you would a SQL query in a database. And, LINQ is actually engineered artfully and brilliantly on top of generics as well as some new features in .NET 3.5, such as extension methods, anonymous types, and Lambda Expressions. Another very important characteristic of LINQ is that it clearly demonstrates Microsoft’s willingness to innovate and take the best of existing technologies like Lambda Calculus—invented in the 1930s—and if it’s good or great, incorporate these elements into the tools and languages we love.

LINQ and its underpinnings are powerful and challenging, and in this book you will get what you need to know to completely understand all that makes LINQ work and begin using it immediately. You will learn about anonymous methods, extension methods, Lambda Expressions, state machines, how generics and the CodeDOM play a big role in powerful tools like LINQ, and writing LINQ queries and why you will want to do it in the bigger, grander scheme of things. You will also learn how to save a ton of time and effort by not hard-coding those elements that you will no longer need or want to hard-code, and you will have a better grasp of how LINQ fits into n-tier architectures without breaking guidelines that have helped you succeed to date.

Brought to you by a four-time Microsoft MVP and columnist for over a decade, LINQ Unleashed for C# will teach you everything you need to know about LINQ and .NET 3.5 features and how to be more productive and have more fun than ever before.

Introduction

My friends and family often ask what I’m working on, and in the case of this book, I was surprised by how they reacted when I told them. When I mentioned that I was working on an XML project, they would inevitably say, “Oh yeah, that’s the new HTML.” I would then find myself in the difficult position of trying to explain a technology that is admittedly hard to nail down in the context of the Web. It’s easy to show someone a Web page and then show them the HTML code that makes it work. Even if they don’t understand all of the code, there is still a very clear cause and effect explanation that is understandable by most. XML is more difficult to explain because many people will never see XML code. Why is that?

Before answering this question, it’s important to understand what XML is all about. XML is about structuring data. More specifically, XML is a general markup language that is used to structure data for any number of reasons. XML code looks a lot like HTML code, except that the tag and attribute names are completely customized to fit each different type of data being represented. Ironically, this can actually make XML documents much easier to understand because the XML tags and attributes fit the data very closely. More important, however, is the fact that XML documents are very easy to process. This means that automated applications such as Web search engines can easily sift through XML documents and extract considerably more meaning than they can get from HTML documents. Does this mean XML will make the Web smarter? The answer is yes, but XML goes much further than that.

XML, unlike HTML, is an extremely broad data-structuring standard that has implications far beyond Web pages. For example, consider this question: HTML is to Web pages as XML is to what? This is a difficult question to answer because XML isn’t really geared toward any one solution. Instead, XML provides the framework for creating customized solutions to a wide range of problems. This is made possible through XMLbased markup languages, which are custom markup languages that you create using XML. If you want to chart the statistics of your child’s baseball team, then you could create your own Little League Markup Language, or LLML, which includes custom tags and attributes for keeping up with important stats, such as hits, runs, errors, and parental outbursts. The high degree of structure in your Little League data would allow it to be easily sorted, manipulated, and displayed according to your needs; the data would have the mathematical flexibility of a spreadsheet along with the visual accessibility of a Web page. XML makes all this possible.